Chinese and Western Linguistic Approaches applied in the Japanese Textbooks for Chinese people in Late Qing Dynasty

摘要

From 1895 to the end of Qing Dynasty, more than 90 Japanese textbooks were published for Chinese people in both Japan and China. These Japanese textbooks were the valuable materials for Chinese people learning Japanese at that time. By analyzing the content of these textbooks, we find that not only the western linguistic approaches but also the traditional Chinese linguistic approaches were used to explain some linguistic phenomena in Japanese. The western linguistic approaches are as follows. First, linguistic typology method was used in these textbooks, pointing that English is inflectional, Chinese is isolating and Japanese is agglutinative. Second, the contrastive analysis between English and Japanese in the aspect of case and parts of speech was made to explain the relation between the noun and the other sentence elements in Japanese. Moreover, the traditional Chinese linguistic approaches are as below. First, the traditional phonology approach of Chinese, such as “Fanqie”, was used to explain how to pronounce “kana” in Japanese. Besides, some Japanese textbooks made a comparison between the accents in Japanese and Chinese to show that the accents in Japanese have the important function of making a distinction in meaning. Second, some Japanese textbooks followed the “charactercentered” tradition in Chinese linguistics and put “Japanese auxiliary words” to the empty word category according to the binary division of “shizi” and “xuzi” in Chinese traditional linguistics. In the meanwhile, these Japanese textbooks provided a series of linguistic terminologies and the methods of analyzing sentence elements for those Chinese people using these textbooks.